Revenge of the Cootie Girls (9 page)

“God, that's terrible.”

“And she and some of her acolytes followed me home and tried to push me into the river once.”

“Jesus. Mary MacCosham stopped a little short of attempted murder. Did you do anything to get back at them? Other than stomping their feet.”

“No. I just ignored them and changed schools as soon as I could get into the school I wanted, when I was ten. I didn't care so much that I was a pariah, because I thought the bullies were idiots anyway, but some kids in Japan get driven off the deep end by bullying. Anyway, I come from a long line of rebellious women, like my funny mother, and her funny mother.”

“What happened to Neiko Hatsumoto?”

“She's dead,” Tamayo said matter-of-factly. “She was blown into the Sea of Japan during Typhoon Vernon in 1993. What happened to Mary?”

“Oddly enough, she moved to New York too. Married some Harvard boy from a bankrupt, distaff branch of the Astor clan, and they moved to the Upper East Side. They got divorced in a big scandal a couple of years ago. Well, it wasn't much of a scandal here. I heard about it back home, where it was huge.”

According to my reliable sources, Mary had had a motherfucker of a midlife crisis. Her husband caught her in flagrante delecto with the guy who was supposed to be installing a sauna, and in the divorce he also named a plumber, a pizza delivery boy, and a cab driver. In the settlement, he got custody of the kids and she had to pay him alimony and child support.

Mary MacCosham. Even now, thinking of her sent a rat up my trouser leg, as Mike likes to say. Pretty in a thin, blonde, stick-up-the-ass, finger-down-the-throat kind of way, she came from one of the two richest families in my hometown.

“She lives here? Have you ever talked to her?” Tamayo said.

“Hell, no. I saw her on the street once, a few years before her motherfucker of a midlife crisis, but I didn't speak to her.”

At first, I hadn't recognized Mary, because she had a different nose and bigger tits. But then I saw the woman she was with was her mother. I hadn't seen old Mrs. MacCosham in a few years, but she looked much the same, even though surgery had probably kept her that way. When they walked away, I knew for sure it was them, because they both suffered from a psychological disorder known as symmetromania—their movements were always perfectly timed and symmetrical. It was funny the way they walked. Mary started out walking to her own gait, but after a few strides, she fell into her mother's painfully exact rhythm.

“Mary's kind of a failed socialite now. In Ferrous, she was a princess. In Manhattan, she's much further down the peerage,” I said, and Tamayo smiled. She seemed to take a strange satisfaction in Mary's misery.

Our food arrived. I called home on the off chance that Kathy had called, and there was one new message, this one from my very occasional boyfriend Eric. He wanted to know if I got his postcard—I hadn't—and said he'd called earlier but the machine was off. He was in Seattle, at the airport, and would be stopping over in New York for the weekend on his way to see his mom in Florida, and he wanted to hang out Saturday and Sunday.

“
Pee-Wee's Big Adventure
, a bottle of vodka, and thou?” he suggested. That would have sounded so good any time but right now.

“Shit,” I said, slamming the phone shut.

“What is it?” Tamayo asked, through a mouthful of crackling chicken.

“Eric's coming to town. Fuck.”

“But you like him.”

“Mike and Eric are
both
going to be here this weekend. Everything is going wrong today. And everything had been going so … okay lately.”

“If Eric and Mike are both here, who will you spend the weekend with?”

“I don't know, that's the problem.”

“Can't you see both of them?” Tamayo said.

“Too
Jules and Jim
.”

“Yeah, it hardly ever works in real life,” Tamayo said wistfully. “A young Tibetan woman I met, a film student, she says that in her culture women are allowed to have up to three husbands.”

“Is there a catch?”

“They're supposed to be brothers. But according to Indra, women of her generation take a broad view of fraternity. All men are brothers under the skin.”

“How do they get the men to go along with that?” I asked.

“I didn't get a chance to ask her that. How do you?”

“Well, I only see one at a time, and I don't date married men or brothers. We all know we see other people, but we don't ask and don't tell about other people we see, we use condoms, and the guys I date spend most of their time out of town.”

Men, I love 'em, but on a full-time basis they cramp my style. Cautious nonmonogamy suits me better, but it's a lot harder than it looks. In order to pull it off, you have to have a fear of commitment slightly greater than your desire for emotional security, kind of like the gravitational hammock on Planet Tamayo. Once you get the right balance there, you have to reach some honest understanding with the men involved, without going into detail or drawing up a contract.

Then you get into the logistics problem, which had actually resolved itself very easily for me, once I stopped dating guys who lived in New York all the time. That way, you avoid embarrassing situations, like being out at a bar with some cute Coast Guard cadet and running into a doctor you recently shagged. For example. Boy, can that make you feel slutty. Which I wasn't, not really, except for a brief period the year before, when, as they say, I “embraced my freedom” and had a few adventures. Now I had one sometime boyfriend, Mike, and a few occasional boyfriends, including Eric, my postdivorce transitional man. Sometimes I felt guilty, because some women have no men and here I was, making a pig of myself with several.

Yeah, the logistics hadn't been much of a problem. Until now. Eric or Mike, Mike or Eric. Yikes. I didn't get to see Eric that often, which may be why we always had a really great time when we did see each other. In the last year I'd seen him twice—for one week in New York, while Mike was in Central America shooting a rain forest documentary, and for a long weekend in London. Things were very loose and easy with both Mike and Eric, which made this dilemma more difficult. It meant making a
decision
and taking the
responsibility
and the
consequences
.

“Talk to Sally. Call her and leave a message on her machine. It can't hurt,” Tamayo said.

“I'm glad Sally is helpful to you, but …” I stopped myself before I finished the sentence and said that Sally is an insane woman whose life is a mess, and who blames it all on bad karma accumulated when she was a promiscuous senatrix in ancient Rome or a murderous Sumerian harlot. There was a lot my other friends didn't know about Sally, which I couldn't tell them because it would mean betraying Sally's confidences. This being-a-good-friend stuff was a helluva lot trickier than I thought it would be.

Besides, I already knew what Sally would say about my love life. For a bald woman with a scorpion tattoo up the back of her skull who burned herbs in a little black iron cauldron, Sally gave shockingly conventional advice about love. She believed in monogamy and marriage—for everyone!—and above all she believed in The Madness.

“Sally is a flawed mortal and she can't predict the future. Or the past,” I said.

“She can tell the future, in a way. She has a way of finding out what you really want, you know, articulating the voice in your heart. I bet she'd have something to say about this Julie business too. She can help you see what it is you really want to do, and that reinforces it somehow,” Tamayo said. “Makes it come true.”

“Maybe what people want to do isn't what they need to do, or are capable of doing. I mean, people can be very easily manipulated, and they could be led into making big mistakes. I had a cab driver today who is convinced someone put a curse on him and his penis is disappearing.”

“That's called Shook Yang syndrome,” Tamayo said. “It's a, what do you call it, mass hysteria not uncommon in Asia. It was unheard of until some quack in China two hundred years ago wrote a medical book and included it. Then men all over Asia started succumbing to it.”

“See how dangerous the power of suggestion is?” I said. I try to keep an open mind and I understand, with the millennium approaching, that people are looking for answers from traditional and nontraditional sources, Jesus, Buddha, dead ancestors, Eleanor Roosevelt, Nostradamus, aliens, etc. But I knew way too much about Sally to take her seriously.

“The power of suggestion isn't dangerous if you know how to use it,” Tamayo said. “Take sigils.”

“Sigils?”

“Yeah, they're short sentences stating your wishes. You take out every repeating letter, rewrite it, stare at it until you have memorized the result, then you burn the piece of paper, or throw it away, and try to forget what you wrote. The message is now lodged in your subconscious, and your subconscious will guide you towards making your dreams come true.”

“Right, gotta go the …”

“… microchip in your buttocks is beeping. Yeah yeah yeah. It may sound insane, but it's really a kind of self-hypnosis. Write down: I will find Julie.” She wrote it on a paper napkin for me, and then crossed out the repeating letters, so it looked like “IwlfndJu.”

“IwilfundJu,” I read, phonetically. “Isn't that a Hasidic Lewis Carroll character?”

“Laugh, but now it is lodged in your subconscious. If you're so skeptical, why did you hire Sally to consult on your special report on the paranormal?

“To get her point of view, not to give her beliefs credibility,” I said. The real reason I hired Sally was to help restore her confidence after a period of intense crisis. My intentions were good. I don't know why I felt so guilty and so responsible for Sally. It wasn't my fault her last beauregard had taken a flyer with $5,000 of her money, leaving no forwarding address, and leaving her in tremendous debt. As if that wasn't enough, her cat, Pie, who had been with her since freshman year at Princeton, died.

All this sparked her major tailspin and crisis of faith, because nothing in her charts or readings of the tarot had predicted it. She stopped taking clients, fell behind in her rent. Unable to “prognosticate,” grieving for Pie, letting the bills pile up, virtually unemployable because of her appearance and attitude, she thought she was left with only two options, bankruptcy court or faking her own death. Then Sally found a different option, and went to work as a human trial subject for experimental drugs, which resulted in a number of unpleasant side effects.

Since the paranormal series, she'd been getting back in the swing of things, which had, at first, made me feel good, because I'd been a good friend and helped her get her confidence back. Now I was feeling kind of shitty, now that a couple of my friends were consulting Sally and actually taking her advice.

“Did you ever play space girl when you were a kid?” Tamayo asked, snapping me back to the conversation. She waved at the waiter for the check.

“Not very often, but I bet you did.”

“‘Star Voyager Tamayo,' my own private television series. In this episode, every episode, Star Voyager Tamayo encounters aliens who want to take over the world.”

“Did you defeat them in every episode?”

“Most, not all. Sometimes the aliens were smarter and having more fun, so I joined them in taking over the world, until worse aliens came along and tried to take it over from us.”

“Julie is going to love you,” I said. Then I had a very childish thought. I hoped Julie didn't like Tamayo better than she liked me.

7

“L
OOK
! A
LAUGHER
,” Tamayo said, as we left Chinita.

A man was standing in the purple neon light radiating from a closed dry cleaner's, laughing at everyone who went past, regardless of whether they were in costume or not.

“A lot of nuts out tonight. That's the first random laugher I've seen since spring,” Tamayo said, referring to the season when the city's insane are lighthearted and tend to tear through the streets laughing at everything. I've felt like that myself a time or two, though not nearly often enough.

“He has a great laugh, doesn't he?” she marveled. With a kind of resigned horror, I watched as she ran up to the laughing man.

“Why did the chicken cross the road?” she said to him. “To get to the other side.”

The man laughed.

“Benadryl Allergy Medicine,” Tamayo said.

The man thought this was equally funny.

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?” she went on, waiting for an answer as though it were a formality. “Because there was no more pudding.”

The man laughed hysterically at her non sequitur, while I tugged her away.

“You shouldn't play with the insane that way,” I said.

“He's harmless.”

“Maybe, maybe not. I've got a clipping at home about two barbers who were killed in an argument with two other men over which came first, the chicken or the egg. No shit. You can't be too careful.”

“His laughter was so
pure
. I'd love to take that guy to a comedy club.”

I yawned, not at Tamayo, but because I was tired and thinking about all the work I had waiting once I found Julie and Kathy. I had reports due, laundry, checks to write, a boyfriend to choose, and I had to make my apartment man-ready, i.e., change the sheets, stock the fridge, and put the toilet seat up.

“Hasn't that vitamin kicked in yet?” Tamayo said.

“Not yet.”

“You're not turning into a square, are you?”

“No, more of a fullerene.”

I was struck by how young Tamayo was, and I don't just mean in the ageless way common among people who live outside the normal space/time continuum. She was hovering around thirty, and she still had boundless energy and the insane belief that all people have something good in them and anything was possible.